Wild Swings

A cautionary tale...

I use my debit card an awful lot in public, saving my credit card and it's federally mandated fraud protection for the web. I wouldn't say I act irresponsibly with it, and I feel I tend to be a pretty harsh critic in that regard. So, I was quite surprise when I went to buy lunch, and my card was declined.

Following lunch, I called the bank and they said that someone in Turkey had used my card, so they had put a hold on the number. I told them to go ahead and cancel the card. The two offending transactions totalled over $3500. To my bank's credit, they corrected my account within three hours. To my bank's discredit, they had tried to contact me about the situation (before I was aware of it) at home during working hours, when they had my work number on file (I asked and confirmed it). They did this twice, on two different days. I hate to think what would have happened had I been pulling an all-nighter.

Color Me Wrong

So, here I sit, writing this entry from my once-abandoned Debian install. It appears that, for whatever reason, the AP in my office just didn't get along with my card that day.

I decided to give the wifi ndiswrapper one more try. So, I downloaded the bleeding edge of the ndiswrapper source out of CVS and gave it a shot. It compiled, but I could get nothing out of the tools but 'bad interpreter'. So, I switched the install back to 1.0rc4 and gave it another try. It came up as soon as I told it the WEP key.

Further experimentation is merited...

It's Still Not Ready

Flush with a bunch of shiny new drive space on my laptop, I decided to give linux another try. They'd made a lot of progress, right?

For those who don't know, my laptop's specs:

• Dell Inspiron 8200
• 1.8GHz P4
• 512MB of RAM
• Mobility Radeon 9000
• TrueMobile 1180 internal 802.11b card

If you know anything about linux, those last two items throw up gigantic red flags. That's where I was hoping to see improvement.

One bonus find was the partitioning tool in Knoppix. Now that was a good open-source experience.

I tried out Debian. I'd heard good things about it for years, and I'm not a linux newbie, so I'm not afraid of the command line. I did the network install, which was pretty cool (especially since I got a bandwidth bump...sustained 560KB/s is sweet!) The "stable" release couldn't even get X to start, no matter what I tried, so I jumped up to the bleeding edge. Turns out that was a lot better, though I was stuck in 800x600.

The video card was easier than I thought. Get the driver from ATI, convert it from a .rpm to .deb with alien, force the install. Looked good, but the module wouldn't load. Turns out you have to still compile it, which was easy enough. I spent 20 minutes figuring that out, where a note from dpkg saying "hey, compile this!" would have been helpful. Apt-get spoils you.

The wireless network was the killer. Turns out the TrueMobile 1180 is made by BroadCom, a company who has never released their wifi drivers for linux. That should have been ok, since there's a nifty tool called ndiswrapper that's supposed to let you use the Windows drivers for the card. However, 2 versions and 5 hours of trial and error lead me to believe that it's just not going to work. I got the radio to turn on once during that time, and it would authenticate and get an IP address, but it still couldn't talk to anything but the router. From my research, it's probably because everything on that laptop is geared to go through IRQ 11. Without wifi, the laptop is useless to me, so the experiment ends there.

So, this ordeal had similar results as trying to load linux on my old Soundwave...frustrating. The Soundwave was never really able to get X to work correctly, because of a horrible NeoMagic video chip. Sorry to the ubergeeks out there. I like my web with links I can click...you know, with a mouse.